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instead of the usual PC upgrades i got a laptop this year.

it is a Acer Aspire 5050.

stats are:
- AMD Turion 64 Mobile Processor
- 14.1 WXGA Acer CrystalBrite LCD
- ATI Radeon Xpress 1100 hypermemory GPU
- 80 GB HDD
- DVD super multi double layer DVD writer.
- 1 GB DDR2 Ram
- 802.11 b/g Wireless Lan

thats what the stiker says anyhow lol.

i was just curious, the thing came with win Vista Home. and to be honest i runs a little slow. and uses 50% of its memory at an idle. ( just sittings and no programs running)
it also seems a little sluggish for a 2 ghz processor. ( i have it setup so its full power while plugged in to AC power)

how many of you out there who own laptops have vista installed or XP? would it be better for me to try to install winXP on it. i didnt get a driver disk for it. just some windows update advantage disk? i think its the win vista home install disk from what i can tell on the directory of it.

how much work would i be looking at putting winxp on it instead of vista? and do you laptop techheads think it would be good or bad? or in most cases should i just leave it be lol.

the PC works ok. but with the high memory usuage it makes playing games, even guildwars hard to play. and guildwars isnt that intensive if you dumb down the graphics and audio. i didnt buy it for games realy. just something mobile to read Ebooks with in the bed room or watch a video or two on the road. for 600 bucks it didnt seem like a bad buy. buy the time i added up a mobile DVD player for the car, a PDA or something to read ebooks. and another DVD player for the bedroom it was close to price so i went with this hehe.

i appriciate any imput you guys can give me on the vista/xp thing.

Ok I have a HP dv8000i. its hat you call a desktop replacement laptop. Its got a 17" monitor so needless to say its big and not meant to be carried around every day. But in the end its still a laptop.

I have win XP Pro on it, as thats what came with it last summer. I made sure to get pro as home usualy an't as powerful. but this is where you may want to look at the Windows Vista thread, it has a article posted aobut vista being a memory hog. From what I have been hearing to run Vista at its best woul require about 4 GB's of ram, but 2 works fine as well. but 1 GB might be a little low to run Vista near its passable potential. I also would liekt o note that the drivers for vista right now are not the best as its still new. I know they have had years to work on them, but they are still not as good as they should be which slows down things.

The problem with mobile CPUs is they're geared to work at minimal power levels so as not to drain the battery. 1GB RAM is ok, but not ideal. Radeon 1100 is ok, but not that good by any desktop standard.
As for mem usage, Vista works differently from previous Windows. Instead of only using RAM for running programs, Vista will actually cache program data/files/exe's/etc in RAM if you use them a lot. For instance, if you use your internet browser, email client, xfire, and AV program every day (most of us here do), those will be loaded already so when you click on them they load faster.
If something like a game needs that RAM, Vista just dumps it.
This means that you'll see your HD having activity even when just sitting there as it caches those files.

thanks for the replies guys.

i looked at the acer web site, ( man its a laggy bugger too! ) and the only drivers for the aspire 5050 is for windows XP. so i guess i do have that option. DL them and put them on CD for future install. i will head over to the Vista thread again and peek around the articles and see what they say.

Jedi, i noticed the HD activation. what concerned me more with Ram usuage, i guess it could be preloading stuff in ram. that would explain alot of what im seeing. the little sidebar widget comes in handy for taken a peak lol.

the Vista rating for the PC is a 3.1
the slowest things ( and the rating is simply the slowest part of your PC.) are both the Ram and the video. both are 3.1

funny thing is, when i had vista preview running on this PC it was also 3.1 but dont recall what was so slow about it. hmm.